Maybe because he knows novels can’t waste time on pointless padding? I fell it is harder to sell a huge book than a big VN (maybe because you can see the former). F/SN is not that huge of a story, but by word count it is bigger than nay single book. It is bigger than most trilogies (apparently it is equivalent to the Harry Potter series as a whole). That hurts the pacing a lot.

Hm, well, it’s a factor (same reason why certain fanfics run forever until they die: digital text is cheap as dirt, paper isn’t), but I don’t think it’s the only one. I feel that Nasu simply doesn’t have as good of a hold on the format.

In FSN he spreads his writing too thin: he attempts to approach the core themes of heroism and ideals from different angles in each route, which is an interesting idea, but the end result is that they can’t quite stand on their own. Fate doesn’t challenge Shirou enough, UBW does challenge him but ends with him reaffirming his ideals in spite of evidence of that being a bad idea, and in HF he does abandon them, but way too soon, leaving him with nowhere to go, character-wise.

Tsukihime has the opposite problem: the route are complete, but some of them stick way too closely to each other, so you get a good story and then you get mostly the same story with only some details changed, which makes for a frustrating read.

By contrast, KnK and DDD are thematically coherent and always move forward since they can’t really repeat the same stuff.

Maybe it’s also the focus. Both FSN and Tsukihime lean towards epic plots (well, half of Tsukihime, anyway), while KnK and DDD focus on individual mysteries and a few people caught in them, which allows Nasu to examine their minds in detail. And, well, portrayal of broken people was always his greatest forte, so maybe it just shines more brightly in his novels.

In FSN he spreads his writing too thin: he attempts to approach the core themes of heroism and ideals from different angles in each route, which is an interesting idea, but the end result is that they can’t quite stand on their own.

I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarely. Them not standing on their own, I mean. Unlike other VNs, you were never supposed to only read on arc. They are even in order here, they were meant to be read as a single thing, one after the other. I don’t think it actually make sense to judge them in separate.

I can agree with your last point, tough. Even in F/SN the epic battles weren’t always the best parts. In fact, for a “battle royale between mages using ancient heroes”, F/SN is less “epic” than you would expect.

That was the idea, yes, and it was an interesting idea, but their structure doesn’t support it, causing a lot of pacing problems and contributing to padding.

The routes are still structured as full story, but since each of them contains only a part of the whole, it leaves a lot of empty spaces that are filled by food porn, repeats of days before and other such things.

I agree with that. But the problem is not that each story don’t feel complete.
That could have worked if Nasu wrote them better.

I think you were right when you said Nasu didn’t get the format right. He made a linear story that must be read on a specific order, but wrote it as if it was a regular multi path VN, which made him fall back into the regular tropes of the.

Now I think about it Ryuukishi made the a similar narrative decision in When They Cry, but instead of presenting it as a regular mutiple choice VN (of which you had to take certain decisions on specific order to proceed) it made it explicitly linear.

I think the biggest difference between Higurashi and Fate isn’t the lack of choices in Higurashi, but pacing. At the end of each route, you’re left emotionally on a cliffhanger — the routes are ‘complete’ in that the story plays out and all the characters meet their ends, and it’s satisfying in that you have more answers than you did when you started, but you never feel like you have the whole picture, so you can’t possibly take each route on its own — they have no clear deliniation.

FSN’s routes, on the other hand, do wrap up. They have complete character arcs, don’t leave much — if anything — hanging, and have “ten years later”-style epilogues that show us the happy future of the characters’ lives. With the exception of Archer’s identity, the ‘mysteries’ the routes solve individually don’t impact the other routes (and sometimes completely invalidate them), and you can easily have an emotionally satisfying experience just going through one of them.

And unlike Higurashi, the format of Fate isn’t part of the story — the structure of it says, “Here is one story told three separate ways,” not “Here are three parts of one story.”

I get the sense that FSN was a concerted effort by Nasu to turn his passion into a career. He’s a better prose writer than VN writer, but despite how good stories like KnK are he probably (rightly) figured he wasn’t going to make it big like that, and saw VNs as a place where someone with good ideas and an eye toward pandering could make it big. Tsukihime was a test, and its success gave him the chance to tell this story he’d been working on since he was a kid to a wide audience — and he knew it would be a success if he played his cards right. And it was. And now, with Witch on the Holy Night, he’s canned Takeuchi, left eroge behind, and come back to the story that started the whole Nasuverse — and, I suspect. the one he’s wanted to tell from the beginning.

I would absolutely love to see the original MnY novel. I bet if he cleaned it up it would be amazing.

Nasu got a few things right; the extremely skilled HF startup and Archer twist and Shirou+Rin personality explorations and Ilya’s arc over the routes are definitely great uses of the medium, but yes, he failed more than he succeeded. The silly rpg stats, Saber romance chucklefuckery, general porngame crap, complete superfluousness and fridgidation of characters in different routes, needless repeats of boring ordinary events, unearned drama in HF, eleventh hour bullshit villains, contradictory themes and messages. In general, this FSN really would’ve been better off as a linear trilogy working on the heroism thing as one long arc of Shirou.

It’s like R07’s Crying Animals novels. VN format kinda crashes and burns on longform cohesive stories, seeing how it’s evolved at “pick the girl” romance sim thingies where the point is (assuming not porn) exploring a bunch of different characters’ interactions under a specific set of conditions. R07 is much better than Nasu at differentiating his routes and themes, with less bloat. But Crying Animals are no VNs either. They don’t even call themselves vn.

There’s another problem that crops up in the digital medium: Nasu isn’t writing just visual novels; he’s writing eroge. It opens up a whole other can of worms (pun intended).

Suddenly, there’s a truckload of sexual violence. The capacity and desire to rape is explicit on the part of the villains and protagonists (previously it was just the gangsters in KnK). The women-as-objects viewpoint gets picked up and never fully dropped, and it really just detracts from the whole experience. There’s only so much you can blame on Takeuchi for it. Even though Nasu does write some stuff very well, like Kohaku’s situation, I’d say it’s like 75% or more garbage.

Yeah. I’m interested in seeing what he’ll say about Sakura/HF when the movies come out. He has to know that he fucked that up.

Fun fact: there’s a HF manga getting serialized right now, and it’s actually doing some work to fix HF’s biggest issues. Sakura is prominent from the start. Her backstory is not hidden. We see what her home life is like. It’s just generally better all-around.

I’ll be sure to tell everyone here about Fate/Extella when it comes out. I don’t think anyone will mind if I call dibs on that, right?

I also have an essay I’ve been meaning to write about the difference between Shirou’s desire to save people in UBW and Shirou’s saving of Sakura in HF. Unfortunately I have some energy issues atm. I’m mentioning it here so that the responses I get can remind me to write that essay when I do have the time and energy.

Honestly, I’m not even sure about the Nasuverse right now. The three main pillars (KnK, Tsukihime, F/SN) are all getting on in years*, so all that’s going on right now is the untranslated Aozaki VN and a million increasingly shallow spin-offs.

Hey, there is also DDD (which, granted, may or may not be a part of Nasuverse proper, but, meh, the tone and themes are close enough). You should read it if you didn’t already. Last time I checked, the first volume was fully translated, and it’s a standalone thing. The second volume is better, but I don’t know about its English translation.

I’ll poke at DDD and see what’s up, but when I say pillar I’m basically just referring to popularity and breadth. I suspect DDD doesn’t really have that compared to the others. Maybe it will be a pillar eventually? Is it ongoing?

Surprisingly, I can’t think of anything glaringly bad in Tsukihime that I wish didn’t exist, even the Akiha romance. Tone down the incest overtones, but that’s basically it. Tsukihime was just good, honestly. In many ways I prefer it to F/SN.

Interestingly, both KnK and DDD are structured as series of relatively short self-contained stories that share the main cast and have overarching character development.

Probably a part of the reason why he thought dividing Shirou’s arc in three parts in FSN was a good idea: he normally is pretty good at writing self-contained stories featuring characters in various states of their development.

I do think one of his major ~problematic~ things is his tendency toward “all violence against women is sexual violence.” That said, it’s a vampire story, and thematically, vampire violence is supposed to be sexual violence, no matter who’s at the receiving end — that’s just the nature of the symbol. It makes sense for Nanaya Shiki’s symbolic loss of self in a vampire story to culminate in his attempted assault of Kohaku (Hisui? don’t remember).

That vampire-sexual-violence tends to manifest in male-on-female violence is a genre problem that Nasu, I guess, could have subverted. But I do think it has to be taken in context of the story as a whole. I actually think the rape scene in KnK is more gratuitous because it’s there just to hammer in how shitty Fujiko’s life is as opposed to having any thematic ties to the story (it didn’t have to be a rape that repaired her nervous system, it could have been a mugging or robbery or hell, a sports injury, just as easily).

I’ll also say that in general, despite his overuse of AVAISV, Nasu is really good about a) having rapists be obvious bad guys b) having sexual assault be about the women and not the men and c) not using it as a default form of character growth for female characters. These are admittedly low standard, but most stories out there don’t meet them.

tl;dr Nasu uses this plotline too much but generally does is well and I think KnK is less defensible than Tsukihime.

There is also Arcueid’s route, though, in which you can rape her if you don’t resist hard enough when she accidentally hypnotizes you.

Taken as a metaphor for sexual violence… it’s not very good.

I think I agree on KnK, though. I do understand why Nasu picked rape as a trigger point – it sets up a question of when revenge is justified and should not be stopped, which is a point that’s easier to make with rapists as bad guys – but I do agree that it could have been changed to something else.

Not a random injury, but, for example, a medical trauma. Fujiko is the way she is because her parents tried to “fix” her via some shady treatment. If the treatment was faulty or required regular visits to a doctor, it would be plausible for some drug or something to backfire and restore her ability.

The plot would have to be changed in such a scenario, but I think that would have a potential to explore some interesting themes as well.

Missing a W, but otherwise thanks for introducing AVAWISV, which I’m sure will see more use.

it didn’t have to be a rape that repaired her nervous system

It wasn’t the rape. Once the thug leader got bored with how unresponsive she was to the rape, he hit her in the spine with a baseball bat. That repaired her (and then she unrepaired him).

It makes sense for Nanaya Shiki’s symbolic loss of self in a vampire story to culminate in his attempted assault of Kohaku (Hisui? don’t remember).

Well, first he tried to rape Arcueid under the suggestion of her Mystic Eyes. Regardless of the hypnotism, I still think that’s pretty fairly on him, because murdering her was still on the table.

The rape was against Kohaku, yes. At no point in the game is Hisui sexually assaulted. In fact, she’s the only heroine who isn’t. Not sure what thoughts you have on that, but I guess when half of Kohaku’s backstory is taking all the abuse so that Hisui doesn’t have to face any, it kind of makes sense.

Nasu, I think, toes the line a little too dangerously on point a) rapists being obvious bad guys in Tsukihime. Nanaya Shiki can be kind of out there, and it’s hard sometimes to separate him from Roa or whoever else’s influence. It’s also hard to make rape solely about women in a first-person male narration, especially when Nanaya!Roa!Shiki drops wonderful lines like “it’s the first time I’ve met a woman I would regret killing” as he’s raping her.

I like those rapes. They’re there to show that Nanaya is a bad thing in need of stopping. Nanaya’s compulsive murdererhood wouldn’t cut it when his targets are vampires/monsters/supernaturals. Could he have kicked some puppies instead? Yeah but contriving some baby seals for him to club would be hard to do well.

It is kinda like demonic possession come to think of it. So is Akiha’s inversion. So is Arcueid’s rage. It’s no wonder Nasu went on to write some later on, he clearly digs it.

Btw, wanted to warn you about DDD. The first story (Junk the Eater) includes a portrayal of bulimia that… is not handled particularly well. Mildly speaking.

The second story is massively better and you may want to start with it (you may miss some context, but nothing crucial to understanding it. I actually missed the first story on accident and only read it later, which I don’t regret) to get a feel for the work.

I actually was talking about the magicbubble. Nasuverse portrays a world where magecraft abides by a set of complex and strict laws that can be figured out and exploited by concerned parties. Of course, then the rules are inevitably broken or contradicted by later stuff, hence why it pretends to be scientific.

I feel that it’s a major contributing factor to the fandom being the way it is: Nasuverse rules feel like something you should be able to learn and follow if you put enough effort into it, but they aren’t because character stuff always trumps them, which drives some people crazy.

I get what you’re saying I guess. The effort just feels so token to me that I tend to ignore it. It’s the fans’ fault if they want to meet a minimal effort halfway. No surprise when they fall on their face.

Nah, man, Kotomine is pure Flowey. He can’t feel positive emotions no matter how hard he tries, and gives in to cruelty even though he still understands good and evil.

Chara is the 100% completion type, but one of the big parts of that is that you stop treating people as people and start treating them as a collection of numbers you need to reduce to 0. This is pretty much the influence Nanaya has on Shiki when Shiki encounters non-humans.

Speaking of Undertale (which shall devour all discussions eventually as it cannot be contained in its own thread alone), since we have a Nasuverse thread that’s kinda-sorta easy to find, I figure I should repost this charasheet here (with some corrections):

Chara

Class: Rider

Attributes

Strength: E

Endurance: E

Agility: E

Mana: E

Luck: E

Skills

Magic Resistance: D (EX to resist Command Seals)

Independent Action: A+

Mental Pollution: A (Gamer Mentality)

Battle Continuation: C

Noble Phantasms

A Demon That Appears When You Call Their Name (B, supportive) Allows Chara to possess a willing host. During the possession, the control over the body is shared between the two. The act of possession also awakens host’s Origin with the usual effects.

It should be noted here that Chara can’t maintain a material form, unlike other Servants. Without a host, they’re stuck as a spirit.

Heart-Shaped Locket (EX, supplemental) Allows Chara to store souls of people they killed. Aside from the usual benefits of eating one’s spirit (mana gain), each X souls also provide an increase of one rank to an attribute of Chara’s choosing. Servants’ souls provide an immediate increase of one rank and allow Chara to use their Noble Phantasms at twice the normal price.

The Real Knife (E-EX, Anti-person; Anti-world) Starts as a low-level Noble Phantasm capable of harming Servants but not much else. However, each N increases in attributes increase its rank by one, rising its effectivity. At A rank, one strike is all that’s needed to kill most Servants without incredible Endurance or Luck. At EX rank, the Real Knife is capable of erasing the world in one strike, though such an act requires an enormous amount of mana comparable to manifestation of the Greater Grail.

Something like that. Obviously, X and N numbers are left undefined because I’m lazy and because they’re not that important in a narrative.

It occurs to me that we should probably post the Ayn Rand character sheet here, plus whatever other fun ones there were.

Edit: Also, shouldn’t Chara have some sort of resurrection/time travel power? Perhaps that would make them overpowered, but it makes more sense than just moderate Battle Persistence — which when you think about it, actually doesn’t make sense for an RPG character, who instantly dies when their health is exhausted.

Well, first we’ll need to find the Ayn Rand sheet. I may look into it later.

As for resurrection/time travel, that’s what the first NP is for. Specifically, activating the Origin. In this version, Chara by themselves has no power, but can activate power hidden in a human soul. Frisk’s Origin was Determination, hence the time travel, with other hosts it would be different.

Don’t remember how it aligns with canon (I kinda forgot the finer points of metaphysics involved), but I thought it was an interesting idea to implement. You can give them Frisk if you want time travel, but you aren’t obligated to go for it.

As for Battle Continuation, on low ranks it just allows you to ignore injuries in a fight until someone strikes a fatal blow. That is to say, Chara is not burdened by pain and can fight at full capacity until the last HP.

Maybe I should lower the rank, I think B actually does allow you to fight after death.

Speaking of Undertale (which shall devour all discussions eventually as it cannot be contained in its own thread alone)

I have this bizarre urge to post Undertale topics in the Nasuverse thread, and vice-versa. Anyway, nitpicks:

I don’t think Chara really requires a ‘willing’ host. It’s not like Frisk made a contract willingly; Frisk fell into a bed of flowers. I would think that Chara would either possess the Master upon summoning or move into the nearest compatible host. Incidentally, I don’t get Independent Action for a Servant that is basically a spiritual parasite.

I don’t think the Heart-Shaped Locket should be the name or symbol of Chara’s relationship with EXP and LOVE. The locket is, in fact, one of the only things Chara is legitimately sentimental about, while EXP and LOVE are all about distancing oneself from empathy during murder. Also, the X number of kills should be 7, obviously. Seven human souls.

If you want to integrate the SAVE function, like Mini-Farla seems to suggest, you could turn the Command Seals into saves, since Chara resists them anyway and I don’t like the idea of them being useless. Immediately upon summoning, Chara uses a Command Seal to SAVE. Then, at given killcounts, Chara consumes another Command Spell to SAVE (much like the Genocide Run).

That would work to counter the fact that Chara is really frickin’ weak in the early stages. We could say that Chara typically SAVES again once they can fight on an even footing with Servants, and one last time before the final battle.

I don’t think Chara really requires a ‘willing’ host. It’s not like Frisk made a contract willingly; Frisk fell into a bed of flowers.

Yes, but they remained passive until you called them. Though, yes, you can make the case that they were still present inside Frisk. Possessing unwilling hosts works too.

Incidentally, I don’t get Independent Action for a Servant that is basically a spiritual parasite.

Mana source, mostly. That way, they can kill/abandon their Master and still function for a long period of time. I guess gathering souls could be enough of a substitute for it, though. Plus, you know, “since when were you the one in control” practically begs for it.

I don’t think the Heart-Shaped Locket should be the name or symbol of Chara’s relationship with EXP and LOVE. The locket is, in fact, one of the only things Chara is legitimately sentimental about, while EXP and LOVE are all about distancing oneself from empathy during murder.

Hm, point, but I wanted to use both signature items for NPs. The whole grinding thing could be folded into the Real Knife, but then the Locket won’t see any use as Chara is loaded with NP-powers enough already. I guess it could serve as a relic instead, similar to Rin’s jewelry.

Also, the X number of kills should be 7, obviously. Seven human souls.

That actually depends on how fast you want them to advance through the ranks. Seven souls seem a low number compared to stuff Zero!Caster and HF!Sakura pulled off, which should be Chara’s endgame.

If you want to integrate the SAVE function

It is implemented through Origins. You can give them Frisk as a host if you want time-travel, or you can go in another direction. One of my goals here was to make Chara actually beatable, and unlimited reload prevents that barring special anti-Chara haxx.

That would work to counter the fact that Chara is really frickin’ weak in the early stages.

That’s actually the point. They would die pretty soon after starting a rampage. Or, rather, their host would die while they escape in a spirit form. Then they would switch hosts and start again, more careful and more dangerous.

That’s actually the point. They would die pretty soon after starting a rampage. Or, rather, their host would die while they escape in a spirit form. Then they would switch hosts and start again, more careful and more dangerous.

I’m not sure the concept of a body-hopping Chara makes any kind of sense, though. That feels far too disconnected from the source material, whereas both Fate and Undertale have used similar mechanics for time loops (F/HA and Tsukihime fan disc were both groundhog day loops for different reasons). I think it’s easier to make them a surmountable opponent despite time loops than it is to shoehorn them in as a completely different type of spiritual entity. It introduces a ton of new complications, like “when does Chara stop possessing people”. It doesn’t sound like they’d even need a Master once summoned.

Further, if you’re going on the idea that they share control at first, then they really should only have the Master as their host, because the Master will be the only one that is seriously on board with a rampage. Even if the Master is not okay with rampaging at first, Chara will eventually convince them to by forcing them to die against Servants and reloading. I think it’s much more in-theme with the idea that going along with Chara’s wishes slowly corrupts the Master until the point where they effectively become Chara.

Mana source, mostly. That way, they can kill/abandon their Master and still function for a long period of time. I guess gathering souls could be enough of a substitute for it, though. Plus, you know, “since when were you the one in control” practically begs for it.

I think they should take total control only near the end of the War, then. Maybe start Independent Action at E and have it eventually increase to EX as the spirit takes more and more control. Before then, they should just be a shoulder devil.

I guess it could serve as a relic instead, similar to Rin’s jewelry.

I think Chara being summoned by a heart-shaped locket inscribed with the words “Best Friends Forever” is a goddamn fantastic idea. Here’s what I think it should do if it is an NP: it should turn the host into a spiritual entity similar to a Servant, so they can’t be harmed by the mundies while they’re grinding experience. It’s useless against Servants and really underpowered, but still useful to the team.

One of my goals here was to make Chara actually beatable, and unlimited reload prevents that barring special anti-Chara haxx.

I think it’s better to find a special anti-Chara haxx or create a time jump-based weakness than turning Chara into a different entity. For instance, you could weaken the time jumps so that Servants and Masters get more and more deja vu the more they more or less understand what is happening.

Well… something Farla and I have been discussing for the SYOC shadow war is that maybe Chara should be adapted for different mediums. If Chara is the spirit of totally callous reward-based behavior in RPGs, then transplanting them to a novel should alter them to whatever the novel equivalent would be. For my submissions, I’ve removed their time travel but given them genre savviness: they can intuit that major characters are important, and can predict the outcome of cliche situations. If you’re going to adapt Chara to F/SN, that might be an aesthetic to keep in mind — focus on what metagaming the Grail War (or visual novels in general) would look like, instead of feeling obligated to keep Chara’s RPG powers perfectly consistent.

To be fair, metagaming VNs actually is based on save scamming. And, in FSN case specifically, on building relationships with your assigned love interest.

Metagaming the HGW is kind of a mess because it mostly revolves around different types of haxx interacting. Like, haxx A beats haxx B, which beats haxx C, which beats haxx A. So if you have haxx A, you should wait for the Servant with haxx B to off the Servant with haxx C and then kill them.

Guess I can just give Chara Mind Eye (True), which would allow them to intuit stuff about other Servants and how they compare.

Using innocents to power up your Servant is also a popular tactic, but that’s covered already under grind mechanics.

True, though I also like your idea of saying Chara is powerless on their own and piggybacks off the host’s specialties. It does occur to me that in Undertale, LOVE and independent action are emphasized more than saving for Chara’s powerset. Your proposed solution of a high mana cost could work — after all, presumably determination can eventually run out in Undertale’s ‘verse, it just doesn’t for us because Frisk is The Most Determined. Maybe it drains the mana of the host, potentially jeopardizing it? We could also say that Chara’s ability to jump hosts fills a similar role — you can kill one body, but they’ll just pop up again, ready to counter whatever strategy you used the first time. This could even be metaphorical for games with save limitations.

And, in FSN case specifically, on building relationships with your assigned love interest.

Y’know, if Asriel is anything to go by, Chara’s actually pretty good at this. This could simply manifest in them being good at (nonmagically) persuading their host to help them.

Guess I can just give Chara Mind Eye (True), which would allow them to intuit stuff about other Servants and how they compare.

True, though I also like your idea of saying Chara is powerless on their own and piggybacks off the host’s specialties.

Yeah. The way it works now, they’re very weak at the beginning and have to rely on Origin powers (whatever they may be. Technically, Origin stuff can be comparable in power to Servants, but in practice it’s typically far less dramatic and sometimes outright harmful to you) of the host, magecraft (if the host is a proper magus) and Command Seals.

As they grind, they become more and more powerful, and killing Servants gives them special abilities.

I think it reflects the temptation of LOVE well enough.

Maybe it drains the mana of the host, potentially jeopardizing it?

That’s the idea. It’s not necessary if the Origin powers are weak, but if Frisk is Chara’s Master and has Determination as Origin (giving them the time travel powers), draining them of mana and potentially killing them if they reload far too many times without grinding afterwards is a way to limit it and make them beatable.

Another approach is the Counter-Force. Something like time loops would be frowned upon by both Gaia and Alaya on account of fucking with the fundamentals of the world, which is likely to result in corrective actions. People guided to the right place and the right time to counter Chara, people being offered a deal with the World to become stronger, disasters striking the area. Fun stuff.

We could also say that Chara’s ability to jump hosts fills a similar role — you can kill one body, but they’ll just pop up again, ready to counter whatever strategy you used the first time.

Thinking about it, tactics built around body-jumping don’t work that well if Chara needs a willing host. They would need to secure cooperation of the host time and time again.

Outright possession would work, but that loses the demonic aspect of following Chara’s will being your choice.

Y’know, if Asriel is anything to go by, Chara’s actually pretty good at this.

I don’t know. I think it speaks more about Asriel than Chara, to be honest. They don’t appear particularly charismatic when they talk.

It seems more in-theme to have Chara learn this stuff through resets.

Mind Eye (False), then. That skill allows you to quickly gather info on opponents by observing them. Unlike the true version, false one is about experience and perception rather than intuition. Basically, Check action.

To be fair, metagaming VNs actually is based on save scamming. And, in FSN case specifically, on building relationships with your assigned love interest.

So, from the perspective of a character in the VN, metagaming boils down to “waiting for your route”. Chara would basically be like Rider: weak and easily eliminated when it’s not their route.

I do see the merit in adapting Chara to the medium rather than sticking to RPG metagaming, but VN’s are seriously limited in that aspect. Half the purpose of Chara in Undertale was to provide a driving force towards the type of decision-making that works for a normal RPG but spits on Undertale’s story and themes. How does that carry over into a VN?

Thinking in terms of VNs is probably a dead end since then, yeah, you’re stuck with Chara route, which is silly.

Building on the Holy Grail War in-universe would work better, I think. Sacrifice of innocents that works wonders, murdergame nature of the war pushing even an innocent master into accepting Chara’s brutal methods. Stats that matter above legends.

Basically, Chara is someone for whom heroism just doesn’t work, who is not great the way Heroic Spirits are supposed to be but who suprasses them by virtue of spilling enough blood of weak people.

Chara isn’t an NPC, though, they’re the player. The player doesn’t have to wait for their route, the player just has to know the right choices to get the outcome they like the best. Or to get 100% completion/collect all the trophy wives/get the True End/whatever. VN!Chara would therefore have a good understanding of choices and possibilities, the genre savviness to avoid unfavorable endings, and the determination to reach the True End.

…Which, now that I think about it, implies the only way to beat Chara is to make them play Remember11, the game with no ending. Infinity loop!

But I think we’re getting off-topic. The kind of HGW stories this stat sheet would be used for would probably be straight prose rather than visual novels.

Yeah, VN!Chara being the mentality of rushing towards the True End to the expense of everything else makes a lot of sense. That was one of the few interesting ideas expressed in the Zero Escape series.

I like the idea of tying time travel/other abilities to the Origin of the host, though. That way, they come from the human soul rather than Chara.

Chara not being able to jump hosts very often due to the shared control is a valid point, though. Sticking with their Master may be the way to go. I’m not entirely convinced that time travel is absolutely necessary for it, though.

Here’s what I think it should do if it is an NP: it should turn the host into a spiritual entity similar to a Servant, so they can’t be harmed by the mundies while they’re grinding experience.

That’s actually kinda covered under the first NP: Chara’s stats apply to the host, otherwise most of them would be useless. As we see with Rin, Agent Smith and Shirou, mundanes still can hurt Servants, they just normally suck at it.

I think it’s better to find a special anti-Chara haxx or create a time jump-based weakness than turning Chara into a different entity.

Well, one possible weakness is simply for time travel to require mana that isn’t restored by the act of time travel. That way, Chara would still be more or less unstoppable at early stages (as long as they don’t kill themselves via time travel, they can always grind to restore their supplies), but you can win the battle of attrition when they save before the final fight as there is no opportunity to grind anymore, presumably.

Chara shouldn’t be able to parasitize Command Seals until they hit max LV, I don’t think. Their biggest weakness is that they are dependent on the player’s cooperation: they can’t force you to kill until the very end, and nope away if you choose to abandon Omnicide. Command Seals are still useful because they give a power boost when the Servant agrees with the command, and that fits thematically with the idea of the player empowering Chara by giving them the command to FIGHT.

Hm, so maybe some kind of NP (the Locker, I guess, with the grind stuff rolled into the Real Knife) that makes it so when Master uses a Command Seal, they give up a part of control over their body to Chara that can’t be taken back even if they wish?

That actually would tie in with the Grail metagame. Command Seals are a leash that keeps Servants on the side of their Masters, as well as a powerful weapon allowing Servants to perform feats beyond their nominal abilities. Most Masters regard their Servants as nothing more than tools and guard their Seals carefully, but still have to use them to ensure victory.

Chara, being very weak at first, would probably force their Master to use the Seals just to survive, becoming more and more in control as a consequence.

The first time the host goes along with Chara’s will reflecting their Mental Pollution, the host gets Mental Pollution (Gamer Mentality) skill themselves at rank E.

Each time afterwards they do the same, the skill increases slowly. Grinding is a particularly easy way of doing so, and normally the increase of the skill would correspond to the increase of the Real Knife rank. Using Command Seals to support Chara, with their agreement, automatically increases Mental Pollution by one rank.

Well, I got the impression the omnicide ending was intended to make you horrified at your own actions, so turning the host into a silently screaming vessel with no control would be more accurate to the source. The idea was also that Chara didn’t corrupt you, Chara was always inside you and reflective of behavior you already had.

The idea was also that Chara didn’t corrupt you, Chara was always inside you and reflective of behavior you already had.

Yeah, the game gives you every opportunity to turn back right up until the end. I have a hard time reconciling the idea of the hosts’ identities and wishes being at all important if they’re just random people Chara can bodyswap to, though. That’s another reason I wasn’t so hot on the idea of Chara bodyjumping: they are supposed to reflect the slow and willing corruption of one individual.

@Roarke: Hm, really? I don’t think the specificity is necessary — Chara is a universal construct shared by many people. They can retain their levels but reset the corruption counter with each new host, that works.

Chara is a universal construct shared by many people. They can retain their levels but reset the corruption counter with each new host, that works.

I do agree with the universal construct idea, and I admit that’d be a point in favor of bodyswapping: showing just how many normal people fall into Chara’s trap makes them a scarier and more effective villain. It still raises some hard questions about character conservation and all that.

However, I emphatically disagree with retaining stats. For one, that makes the corruption harder every time, as the hosts are getting driven into a corner less and less. Second, I really think Chara’s trap loses the meaning unless each person makes the choice to kill for power from Step 1.

I think the bodyswapping does introduce an interesting possibility/complication: Origins. Chara is exactly the kind of metagamer that would seek out hosts with Origins favorable for fighting the Servant that just defeated them.

If you reduce the number of killing that needs doing until Chara is back to fighting strength, it could work.

Noble Phantasms (couldn’t decide on exactly what it should be, so just pick one or two you like the most)

Reality Marble (Galt’s Gulch) (EX, no classification)

TL;DR (A, Anti-world)

Wild Capitalism: Kill The Poor. (unranked so far, no classification)

A city-wide boundary field which creates a mental pressure on everyone within an area causing people to behave perfectly selfishly. Can be resisted with mana circulation or Magic Resistance skill.

In addition, everyone with mana level below that of a magus (including magi who have spent their mana) can be drained by Rand at will.

Unnamed idea for an NP 1:

I think rather than a Reality Marble of some kind, she should have access to sorcery. How about overturning the law of equivalent exchange? There’s no reason for Ayn Rand to bow down to that if she’s a Servant.

Unnamed idea for an NP 2:

The real power of Ayn Rand was that she didn’t hesitate when that sort of thing happened, but took it as her due and just kept trucking along calling everyone else a parasite, explaining that cats had objective value because she paid for a magazine of their pictures, and that objectively a hot guy needed to sleep with her.

Maybe her NP should be something along the lines of being able to define her immediate self-interest as 110% rational behavior for everyone in the vicinity, so that the other characters have to struggle to oppose what she wants? Could be fun if it’s basically worthless against the servants but she can spam it on the masters, so they order their servants back.

Noble Phantasm: Katniss Compulsion (B +/-, no classification)

Ayn Rand forces those who can see and hear her to treat her as they would a Sue. This effect is lessened against targets who were treated like royalty in life, but heightened against those who served royalty.

Another idea Farla had was that Katniss Compulsion could be used at will, but became weaker the closer the target was to Rand. This would fit with the fact that in real life, her writings were hugely successful but she was unpleasant and unconvincing in person. This would also be a clever way of making her an Archer (which I believe you said made the most sense for her, as that’s the class with the highest Independent Action).

Even though this skill is virtually useless to Chara under normal conditions as they can’t truly act without their host, the high rank allows them to persist in spirit form between the Wars.

Mental Pollution (Gamer Mentality): A

Battle Continuation: C

Eye of the Mind (True*): B

Capable of calm analysis of battle conditions even when in danger and deduce an appropriate course of action after considering all possibilities to escape from a predicament. So long there is even a 1% chance of a comeback, this ability greatly improves the chances of winning.

*Mixed up True and False versions. True is the one based on experience.

Noble Phantasms:

The Real Knife (E-EX, Anti-person — Anti-world, Supportive)

A knife that eats souls. Aside from the usual benefits of eating one’s spirit (mana gain), each seven souls also provide an increase of one rank to an attribute of Chara’s choosing. Servants’ souls provide an immediate increase of one rank and allow Chara to use their Noble Phantasms at twice the normal price.

As a weapon, it starts as a weak E-ranked Phantasm barely capable of hurting Servants. However, each four increases in attributes increase its rank by one, rising its effectivity. At A rank, one strike is all that’s needed to kill most Servants without incredible Endurance or Luck. At EX rank, the Real Knife is capable of erasing the world in one strike, though such an act requires an enormous amount of mana comparable to manifestation of the Greater Grail.

Morover, the Real Knife imposes the concept of stats on the opponents as long as it benefits Chara. Enemy Servants cannot win in contests based on their attributes and skills agains Chara if Chara’s corresponding stats are higher. For example, enemy Servants wouldn’t be able to dodge Chara if Chara’s Agility is higher than theirs. Likewise, their Noble Phantasms would fail to counter the Real Knife if they’re ranked lower even if normally they should be able to perform such a fit.

This applies only to direct contests, so the use of clever tactics and traps is still possible.

Heart-Shaped Locked: Best Demons Forever (B, supportive)

Allows Chara to possess a willing host. During the possession, the control over the body is shared between the two. The act of possession also awakens host’s Origin with the usual effects. (For concerned parties, that’s where you get time travel if you want to use it.)

Acceptable hosts are limited to people bearing Command Seals.

It should be noted here that Chara can’t maintain a material form, unlike other Servants. Without a host, they’re stuck as a spirit.

In addition, each time the host allows Chara to act in accordance with their Mental Pollution, they irreversibly give up a measure of control to them permanently. The more they grind, for example, the less they’re capable of stopping Chara from grinding more.

Assuming grinding is all the host did that would count towards this process, they would lose control over their body completely once the Real Knife reaches EX rank. However, the use of Command Seals to support Chara greatly accelerates the process. Using all three Command Seals with Chara’s agreement and for their benefit would result in a complete loss of control regardless of other actions.

EX is indeed the next rank after A.It actually means “beyond measure” in that you can’t really quantify EX ranks. They’re absolutes.

But it’s Chara, so now they’re normal stats.

Technically, you also have partial ranks, like A+ or B–, though normally they indicate conditional fluctuations. For example, that Greek guy whatshisname whose powers only worked when he stood on solid ground would have his Strength be something like A–, as it can decrease if you were to lift him.

Fate/Extra did use A+ and A++ as ranks you reach before EX, and, as it’s the most natural form of HGW for Chara to inhabit, such a mechanic may actually be appropriate. But, eh, I’m sticking to general Nasuverse for now.

Sure, it’s a fan disk, but it was kinda nasu’s way of patching up some of the things he did imperfectly in FSN.

This honestly kind of pisses me off the same way it does that F/SN itself got rereleased with some of its more offensive parts (Fate!Shirou’s sexism, the sex scenes) simmered down or edited out. I don’t think I can even articulate why. It feels like a cop-out, sure, but there’s more to it, I think.

Isn’t that really a good thing? That authors kinda get what went wrong and tries to fix it.

I think that it’s kind of a fandom thing. The desire for others to have exactly the same kind of experience as yourself. But that explaination only explains the feelings towards the altered main game, as really fha doesn’t really alter the experience when you are playing the main game, only patching things in hindsight to make everything overall better.

Anyway, logically,things like that can only do good, right?

Fha as a fan disk still has a ton of comedy, but it does fill in the gaps characters like lancer and caster and mr.teacher left in the main game. It also tried to make sakura..better? But I’m not sure it really succeeded in that regard.

It is a good thing. The less objective terrible FSN contains, the better. If Nasu ever goes back and writes some extra new scenes full of flashy new servants, we can accuse him of Lucasing.

FHA doesn’t really fix anything, it mostly elaborates on stuff that didn’t come up in main game and adds something completely different. This results in Lancer and Caster retroactively losing all narrative gravitas they ever had, but the hijinks can always be disregarded as fanfiction to preserve those (most daytime hijinks are ghostwrit fanfic anyway).

It is a good thing. The less objective terrible FSN contains, the better.

Yeah, I know it’s a good thing. It’s good for everyone who picks F/SN up from now on. It’ll be a cleaner experience and fewer people will be triggered/offended. For me personally, though, that stain will always be there, so I’m not going to give the clean version a pass. I know it’s got skeletons swept under the rug, to use an awful mixed metaphor.

Yeah, that’s basically how I feel about it in general. It feels like a very cheap way to retract your statements without actually apologizing for them, and I have little to no interest in seeing Nasu backpedal on whatever he thought needed fixing in F/SN.

There is a reason Higurashi and Umineko are called Sound Novels, and that’s because the devs apparently managed to secure every talented composer in the industry while hiring some random dude who liked to doodle on textbook margins as their artist.

Actually, the devs (i.e. Ryukishi07, his brother and a friend) never hired anyone for the art. It is all Ryukishi himself.

07th Expansion is a really small indie developer. Back in Higurashi (the question arcs) they didn’t even hire anyone at all. The soundtrack was entirely from free stuff they found on the internet. It was only in Kai that they started bringing people, and even then it was all fans of their work.

The reason it is called a “sound novel” is not because they could hire talented composers (though they eventually could), but because they put more effort on atmospheric music and sound design than on visual art. The name change is just to emphisize their focus.

Well, now I am curious as well. I wonder if it is even possible to find. But the game book is probably better, actually. Sure, more amateurish art, but I would bet there is less half naked kids as well. Studio DEEN can be quite gross when they want (and they usually do want).

Yeah, the thing about the snark is that it represents the unknown. It never actually appears in the book and we don’t get a good description of it, so ascribing to it various metaphysical properties is actually fine. The only description there is is as follows:
“Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again
The five unmistakable marks
By which you may know, wheresoever you go,
The warranted genuine Snarks.

“Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,
Which is meagre and hollow, but crisp:
Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,
With a flavour of Will-o’-the-wisp.

“Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree
That it carries too far, when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea,
And dines on the following day.

“The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.

“The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes—
A sentiment open to doubt.

“The fifth is ambition. It next will be right
To describe each particular batch:
Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,
From those that have whiskers, and scratch.

“For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm,
Yet, I feel it my duty to say,
Some are Boojums—” The Bellman broke off in alarm,
For the Baker had fainted away.

Act spent a lot of her playthrough in Fate/Stay Night — even the sexist, shitty Fate route — praising Nasu’s simile/metaphor porn. However, let us not forget that it isn’t only Nasu worthy of that praise. For it is not by Nasu’s hand that we were able to read this wonderful story outside of its native language. It was brought to us by a dedicated group of fan translators, and by dedicated I mean really dedicated.

Nasu’s style is notoriously hard to translate. Which is why we get such wonderful lines like, “People die when they are killed.” in the 2003 anime and more recently, “Just because you’re correct doesn’t mean you’re right.” in 2014/15’s UBW anime.

I bring this up because Xseed has posted their first localization blog about their work on Fate/Extella, the Dynasty Warriors sequel to Fate/Extra and CCC. Just because the genre has changed, doesn’t mean the length and quality of the writing hasn’t. Extella has enough text to fill a JRPG, all written by notoriously hard to translate Kinosu Natsu. Here is just an excerpt from the blog.

‘We encountered lines that made the whole office scratch their heads. One of Tamamo’s lines, for example, has her say (with the context of having just been lightly wounded), “この程度の痛み、馬耳東風に糠に釘、焼け石に念仏ですよーだ。” — which literally translates to, “For this level of pain, it’s quite useless to turn a deaf ear and I’ll just pray to Buddha on a hot stone.” Several native Japanese speakers came together to ponder that one, eventually puzzling out that the line was a deliberately mangled mishmash of three different Japanese idioms, all referring to doing something foolish and futile. In our rough draft of the English script, bits and pieces of which appeared in the E3 demo, we edited this line to, “Is that the best you can do? You haven’t got a prayer!” That conveyed the same message, and included some of the same imagery, but departed from the style of the original line. To get the same point across without losing that style, we eventually came up with, “You might as well try to push a boulder through the eye of a needle, uphill both ways!” Similar lines appear throughout the script, including entire dialogue trees revolving around Japanese puns. In each case, we’ve done our best to convey the intended meaning while staying as closely as possible to the original line’s tone and tempo — while also making each line sound “in character.”’

Here’s the link in case you want to read the rest: http://xseedgames.tumblr.com/post/154787104005/fateextella-the-umbral-star-localization-blog

These localizers/translators must be very well read based on their work in Fate/Stay Night. It might be worthwhile to look them up and see what they’ve done since. Hopefully they’ve been hired by Xseed.

Fridge thought: oh man, the translators really did their job if Act can easily tell the sex scenes weren’t written by Nasu. That or even they couldn’t be bothered to make the sex scenes good lol

A quote from someone explaining why Persona 5’s localization is a hot mess, “Translation can be a murky concept, so first I’ll define a standard to measure against: imagine if translation weren’t necessary at all.

In other words, imagine that the original writer is perfectly fluent in both languages and writes both versions personally. That creation—a perfect reflection of creator intent—is the standard to which translators must strive.

Translators must be skilled writers, ideally even more skilled than the creators of the works they translate.”

When I think about the zero budget translation of Fate/Stay Night, those volunteers sound only more incredible to me. They did an amazing job.

I think it has something to do with our favorite writer whose pen name translates as “Mushroom Eggplant” aka Kinoko Nasu. As I mentioned earlier, his writing style really pushes the limit of the Japanese written language to the point where even native speakers may find some lines incomprehensible.

And then there’s the total amount of text to translate. Fate/Extella was a Musou game, which aren’t known for long cutscenes, and still managed to have a script comparable to a standard JRPG. The Bloomburg article I mentioned in the original comment mentions that one of the selling points of the app is the writing. So I’m willing to bet that Grand Order has more text than Extella. Localizing Grand Order means committing a lot of time and effort into the script.

A part of me is disappointed that Xseed didn’t get to publish Grand Order, but I am curious to see how Aniplex handles the localization.

The otaku mind isn’t interested in anything as pedestrian as breasts. Their desires lie with the much higher concept of the breast, the platonic ideal of them, unshackled by unnecessary impurities like biology or physics.

At least that’s what I get from the internets. The stereotypical depiction of Japanese nerds might be blown out of proportion a bit, but there seems to be plenty of visual proof.

That Artemis picture is incredible. Just look at dat* ass. Having recognized the impossibility of depicting her behind due to the pose optimized for maximum boob, the artist opted to add a random woodland beast to cover this grave deficiency. This is the sort of initiative we like to see in anime sexy girl drawing industry.

Urgh, this worst part of this is that Artoria’s Lancer form (and Lancer Alter) is actually a pretty interesting spin on Artoria’s character (basically, Artoria if she was allowed to age past 16, and lost her magic swords) and they actually have pretty good base designs. But like a lot of the more heavily armoured/clothed women in Grand Order, she loses clothing which each stage. Her Stage 1 armour is pretty cool (both forms), the second stage is a bit more sexualized but still not too over the top as far as anime goes, and her third stage is… well, that.

Non-alter Lancer is even better. Her first stage armour is fucking cool. Her second stage is basically the same thing but without the helmet and a slightly shorter skirt. Her third stage takes her out of her armour, but the cleavage-bearing dress is still infinitely more tame than some of the shit this game gets up to.

Here’s art of Artoria-Lancer (Stage 4) by Akira Ishida to compare to the art above of Lancer Alter (Stage 4) by the same.

It’s downright classy in comparison to Lancer Alter. It actually kind of makes me think of something she might comission as a portrait for regal purposes. Stage 4 Lancer Alter makes me think of something she might put on before breaking out the ropes and candles with Guinevere. Not quite the same.

So, is anyone here actually playing that game? It seems it has a surprisingly well developed story for a mobile game. I only really played the prologue so far, but I am liking what I am seeing. Apparently Nasu even took over the writing for the later chapters, so it will only get better.

But, yeah, the female clothing design is awful, to put mildly. You really need ignore it if you want to enjoy the story.

I’m playing, and somewhat enjoying. The localization at launch wasn’t great–they misspelled ‘Shakespeare’ in his summoning quote. Today’s maintenance explicitly stated that it would improve the translation, so I’m curious to see what changed.

Story is pretty good. It has good pacing, nice characters, interesting premise. Chapter 1 is pretty fun, but Chapter 2 is boring. Even the developers admitted that Chapter 2 was wasted potential.

I actually don’t like the gameplay much. It is not awful, but it is a repetitive and mindless. Maybe latter it becomes more intereting, but so far it seems I either completely dominate or am clearly underleved.

The story is inconsistent, yes, but I think it have been mostly enjoyable. Maybe if it wasn’t Fate I would care that much, but I would probably still play for a while. But it is fate and it does get better for what I’ve hear, so I plan on continue for a while.

I am definitivelly not planning on spending money, though. Not only cost benefit is awful, it is freaking gambling.

Santa Kirei! I’m sad that Waver, Kiritsugu, Irisviel, and Rin got to be servants in Grand Order, but there’s no Kirei servant (Shirou Kotomine doesn’t count). Does anyone else think that Arjuna looks like Shinji or is it just me? Also, how many lolis did they cram into the game? I remember Jack the Ripper, Shuten-doji, one half of the pirate duo, and Chloe Einzbern. Hopefully that’s it, right? (the game is also still creepily fetishistic towards bi women.)

Both Shuten-Doji and Ibaraki-Doji are pretty young looking (but Ibaraki-doji isn’t nearly as bad as Shuten-doji, thank god). But, really, it’s not just the younger looking characters. Fate Grand Order is also pretty bad with its adult female characters as well; just in a completely different way. The entire characterization of Minamoto no Yorimitsu (the Berserker whose boobs are tied onto her chest with bondage ribbons someone posted above) is basically the character designer saying to himself “how much ara ara MILFiness can I cram into a single character?” And then he crammed so much in that parts are threatening to pop off if she jumps around too much.

I’m not sure about any bisexual women the came treats with creepy amounts of fetishism, but I’m sure there are a ton. The nasuverse is kind of terrible when anyone but Nasu is writing for it, huh? And even then, it’s kind of… well, the parts of it that were originally light novels (KnK and Mahou Tsukai no Yoru) aren’t shameful?

I disagree with your conclusion, though. For some reason, I get the feeling that Takeuchi would never want a Saber with such a developed figure.

I disagree with your conclusion, though. For some reason, I get the feeling that Takeuchi would never want a Saber with such a developed figure.

Of course not. That would mess up with the youthfulness fetish going on.

Speaking of which, I noticed Grand Order seem really obsessed with havig women young. Elizabeth Báthory, Marie Antoinette and Boudica are all explicitly described as very young in-game (Marie mention going through puberty!). None of them were particularly young by the time they became historical/mythological relevant. So why have them so young? It is really creepy.

Well, I can kind of understand it for Elizabeth Bathory, at least. Her legend is based entirely around attempts to maintain her youth. And there is precedent for servants not being the age of their legend (because a heroic spirit who qualifies as a servant qualifies at all points of their life, not just at the point where they became heroic). Saber Lily is Saber as a princess instead of a king, and Artoria Lancer is a decade older than Saber.

1) There is a big difference between being obsessed with youth and being a fucking loli. Bathory being in her early twenties is perfectly reasonable, Bathory being a child is not.

(I suppose the anime artstyle fucks it up: when everyone is young-looking, it’s hard to portray someone obsessed with youth without going loli, but it’s not an excuse, it’s a larger problem.)

2) She’s portrayed as a perky idol girl instead of, you know, a horrifying killer who thought it justified to murder innocent people and bath in their blood in the name of her obsession.

3) Sexualization. Someone attempting to achieve eternal youth and overshooting into a child is actually kinda funny (or even dramatic if you go full Claudia on it)… but not when she’s then presented as desirable because, seriously, fuck that noise.

Actually, I was thinking of the Assassin/Carmilla incarnation (who is in her mid-twenties) and not the Lancer version with the pink hair (which I totally forgot about because why would Elizabeth Bathory be a Lancer?). Lancer-Elizabeth is supposed to be Elizabeth Bathory before she became the serial killer, so it’s actually reasonable to portray that one as not a serial killing monster, at least. Carmilla’s the version after she’s become a serial killer, and she’s dived straight into being an Atsuko Tanaka Ara Ara Vampire Queen.

Been playing it as well (despite having to go through some loops due to living in EU), and I’ve enjoyed my time so far. Was kinda surprised about there being an actual story, and the animations look really nice for a game like this.

I’ve also yet to fall for the temptation of the Gacha… but we’ll see once Shiki rolls around.

On the positive note regarding the clothing, most of the characters tend to have at least one not-as-stupid phase, so switching all of their arts to that one while ignoring the others helps.

Wait, the game wasn’t released in the EU either? Was it only realeased on the US? I too had to jump through some hoops, but I live in Brazil, so that is expected. I would think they would at last release it on Europe.

On the positive note regarding the clothing, most of the characters tend to have at least one not-as-stupid phase

One of my favourite F/GO servant concepts is Tamamo Cat. I love the idea of taking the story of Tamamo no Mae, and adapting it to the berserker class based on the very end of the story where the kitsune sorceress is revealed for what she is and goes on a mad rampage. I loved the idea ever since I had a talk with a friend about heroic spirits in alternate classes, and guessed that Tamamo would also be summonable as a berserker based on her legend. It was even better, since Tamamo as a Caster had probably the best skillset of any Caster for me if I were a Master (though I’d regret the lack of a good Territory Creation), but if I had to summon a servant (and I couldn’t get the Saber class because Saber is the best), I’d want Berserker.

And then, the game designers actually agreed with me and added it. They were even pretty generous. They let her keep E rank witchcraft (which allows her to bypass A Rank Magic Resistance) and B rank shapeshifting. And they dramatically toned down the waifu-bait slavishness.

That said, now that I look at the sprite more closely, Tamamo Cat’s red dress really isn’t any worse than Caster’s blue one on its own, it’s just that Tamamo Cat is a bit bustier (probably because this is the physical-focused Tamamo, if I had to guess) so it becomes more evident.

And her maid costume isn’t that bad, all things considered… except for the fact it’s a maid costume. If it were a sundress or something, that actually wouldn’t be so bad.

(I suppose the anime artstyle fucks it up: when everyone is young-looking, it’s hard to portray someone obsessed with youth without going loli, but it’s not an excuse, it’s a larger problem.)

Actually, there is an older Elizabeth Báthory in the game(Carmilla). She is much older looking, of course, but is still ‘young’. She is literally the culmination of eternal youth Elizabeth was looking for. You could have a still young looking Elizabeth that isn’t a loli, if they wanted.

She’s portrayed as a perky idol girl instead of, you know, a horrifying killer who thought it justified to murder innocent people and bath in their blood in the name of her obsession.

To be fair, apparently that part of her character was more evident on Fate/Extra where she debuted. Apparently the Elizabeth in this game is a post-character development one. One that gave up on murder and obsession with youth.

Anyway, @CrazyEd, yes, by lore they can justify having young looking girls in the game. But the why did they feel the need to do so? Specially for minor character. That is the problem, there are still people making these decisions. I can excuse them for having Saber and Caster Lily, that is an alternate take on an already existing character, whatever (though Saber Lily feels a bit redundant). But they created Boudica and Antoinette for that game. Why did they insist on making Marie a teenager? What purpose did that serve? And why the insistence on describing Boudica as a “young queen” when that youthfulness is completely irrelevant for her character? (also, she explicitly came as a servant as she was at the time of her death, meaning she was 30 in-story)

Caster Lily is not in the NA release yet, so I don’t know how she is written. I can see why her would exist in a younger form, though. Caster’s whole personality is based on the shit she has gone through. She was driven to vilany because of it. So I can see why a young version of her would be a very different character. Saber Lily, meanwhile, is just a naiver and more idealistic Saber. But Saber is already fairly idealistic anyway, and still a bit naïve. The characters are simply not different enough for me to see the point. Her interlude certainly didn’t help matters (it was just a silly comedy scene, nothing interesting).

Huh, are you sure about that? She was described in one of the character books as specifically being from the earlier years of her life.

In Septem it is made clear she came back just after her death, which allowed her to pretend to not have died at all, so at the very last it is implied she looks exactly the same as she did when she died. Then again, Septem is horribly written, so who knows?

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The idea of a pre-bad stuff Medea is fine. It’s just that Caster Lily is basically a fourteen year old girl whose robes are falling halfway off her boobs and have slits up the front so you can see the tops of her thighhighs and all the descriptions of her are like “wow, look at how pure and virginal this girl is, it’d sure be a shame if something happened to her, huh?” with a creepy wink to the camera.

Caster Lily is to Medea as Elizabeth Bathory is to Camilla, basically.

… They even share a voice actress. Atsuko Tanaka is also the source of Caster’s ara aras.

Well, then it is just a mater of bad execution. As I said, the reason I dislike Saber Lily, as a concept, is because she feels redundant. She is just another Saber, who is not different enough on her own to warrant a new character. Caster Lily feels more like she has a purpose to being there. Of course, if they botched the execution that is another matter.

Caster Lily is to Medea as Elizabeth Bathory is to Camilla, basically.

Well, the main difference is that Elizabeth is the original character, no? She is the one that debuted first, not Carmilla. Also, I thought she wasn’t all pure and virginal but rather a wolf in sheeps clothes. I haven’t played CCC, though, so I am not sure.

Well, I’m not so sure Medea’s younger self has that much merit as a concept, to be honest. She is indeed shaped by her experience in large part, and that’s what makes her interesting in the first place. In FSN she was a pretty ambigous figure. Her goals were pretty benigh, but she had zero limits concerning what she was willing to do to accomplish them. That is something that could be taken in many directions depending on the narrative you want to explore, there is something to engage with.

(Plus, her design was perfect. Her shoulderpads alone could carry a story, so I’m objecting on principle to any attempts to change it.)

And it’s not even like you’d get a drastically different version of the character if you go before her story, anyway, not like with, say, Bluebeard. Medea was always pretty ruthless. As I recall, the moment when she tore apart her brother came pretty early in her journey, shortly after meeting Jason.

Basically, I feel that a younger version of her would just be a less complex, less interesting character if you’re at all faithful to some version of her myth and basically an OC otherwise (at which point it’s probably easier to find a more fitting mythological figure).

I think Act summed up Caster’s appeal perfectly in her LP: Despite being by far the most cliche and stereotypical villain in appearance, action, and dialogue, she is by far the most subtle and nuanced of all of F/SN’s villains.

If only she was doing it for a more interesting character than Kuzuki.

(Speaking of Kuzuki, where is his Assassin class incarnation in F/GO?)

Wow, what an incredible interview. I would kill to have a conversation with him.

I think having sisters was a big part of that. We had shounen manga and shoujo manga on the same shelf, and I read them the same. As I read more and more, the idea that “shounen manga are fun to read; shoujo manga have interesting stories” established itself in my mind when I was in elementary school. I always got the sense that shoujo manga depicted people’s inner workings more in its storytelling.

This is so important. It’s why representation matters and why exposure matters. If you teach kids to treat others as human, they’ll see them as human.

I thought the part about how his male friends dismissed Utena out of hand and missed this amazing work because of it was really powerful. Nasu talks so much about gendered oppression and sexuality oppression as if it’s a normal thing to talk about, and in order to do that you have to come from a basis of seeing the Other as part of your world. It’s crazy how much of this is nuture.

My younger brother actually said something similar to me once — that he always thought it was weird that boys whined about Nerd Girls, because he grew up with me, and so it only made sense that girls could be into that kind of stuff. The default wasn’t ‘this was for boys,’ it was ‘this was for anyone.’

representation representation representation

Writers write because we don’t quite trust the power of images. Animators and directors express things visually because they don’t quite trust the power of words.

Goddamn, but I missed Nasu so much and didn’t really realize how much until reading this interview. It kills me not just that he had sisters but that his friend’s older sister can casually hand him a shoujo rec that he’ll clutch to his chest for his entire life. That’s the ideal right there. No barrier to entry beyond quality.

Man, I really feel as if I’m missing out on something here, because I could just not get into Utena, so half of this entire interview is just totally meaningless to me. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had someone recommend a shojo manga to me (… people rarely seem to recommend me things at all now that I think about it…) so I pretty much had to find my own way as far as the entire genre was concerned, and I found that I preferred work with more… I don’t know the word for it. Is there an antonym of “allegory”? I prefer shojo manga where there is non-allegorical content. You could probably make a pretty convincing argument that absolutely none of RGU actually happened. I’m sure someone on the internet has tried.

I never watched Yuri Kuma Arashi, but I did try the manga version (which is apparently substantially different from the anime), and I had a similar problem. Despite the artwork being done by my favourite yuri manga artist in terms of artistic style (though I also adored her writing in Hanjuku Joshi), and being willing to try it just for that reason, I just found the allegory way too dense. And, in theory, it’s a good allegory! It’s just way too overbearingly oppressive in every single aspect of the work for me. Upon finding out the authorial intent behind the story, I actually felt like it would’ve been a far more effective message if he had just written the message instead of masking it in ten layers of craziness.

See, aside from art style and, I think, the focus on characters and relationships as opposed to action that Nasu hits upon here, there’s not really any commonality with which to answer “rec me shoujo” because the genre is hugely varied. It’s like saying “rec me a novel” — you’ve identified a certain iteration of the art form, but it’s still absurdly broad, and the rest depends on the specifics of a person’s taste. Only then can you talk about specific works and subgenres. (I think the paiting of SHOUJO as some hivemind collective is exactly what Nasu’s against here.)

Yeah, perhaps, but my point was that all of that is kind of moot when you’ve never had a shoujo manga recommended to you for any reason in the first place . People just plain don’t ever recommend me things, for some reason (except for that guy I’ve mentioned before who is hellbent on getting me to read every shitty and ultra-creepy LN series under the sun). Unlike shounen or seinen, the only person who has ever influenced my taste in shoujo is me. And I’ve liked a lot of shoujo series. But I didn’t like Utena.

But that said, it’s no more or less a valid thing to say than “recommend me a shounen”. The same thing can be said for that demographic as well. It’s not something people do to shoujo exclusively. Your typical shoujo romance comic that forms the bulk of the genre is way more formulamatic than your typical battle comic that forms the bulk of shounen. Having read a massive amount of shoujo romance comics via potato scans, Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun’s fictional shoujo series Let’s Fall In Love is… not really that much of an exageration of your typical shoujo romance.

Seinen is a lot more varied than both. Neither shoujo or shounen is as varied as “lesbian romance” (both serious- like Hanjuku Joshi- and comedic- like Inugami-san and Nekoyama-san) to “like shounen manga but with more graphic violence and tits” (like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Steel Ball Run and JoJoLion).

All the stuff about Yuri Kuma Arashi was about it as a work of Ikuhara Kunihiko, since it’s the only other thing of his I’ve seen. I actually had no clue RGU and YKA shared a director (and author, in the case of YKA’s manga version) until today. I couldn’t get into them completely independently of each other. Unlike a lot of anime people, I don’t really go for anime based on this studio or that studio, or director A or director B. I probably should start. I now know that I seem to generally dislike things that Ikuhara Kunihiko has directed.

I guess I should’ve said that I prefer my fiction in general to contain at least some non-allegorical content, but I was coming off my thoughts specifically of RGU when I wrote it. RGU might’ve actually been the anime that turned me off to such highly allegorical works in the first place, now that I think about it. That, or NGE, but at least RGU’s allegory actually means something and isn’t just allegory for allegory’s sake. But RGU sometimes implies things harder than something written in the Heian period, and even those stories eventually say something explicitly. I didn’t dismiss it out of hand or anything like that. But I just didn’t like it, and I’m trying to explain why.

Which is a bit sad considered that, to my understanding, yuri as a whole is still a women oriented genre.

As far as I’ve read of commentary from yuri manga authors, yuri manga is very much women writing the stories about women loving women that they wanted to read when they were girls. It just so happens that men who want to read about women loving women want to read the same kinds of women loving women that women do, and straight male otaku spend a shit-ton more money on otaku crap than lesbian female otaku.

It’s the same reason why all “magical boy” anime are either parodies or fujoshi-oriented, but the second largest demographic for Pretty Cute after “girls 5 – 10” is “men 18 – 25”, and why gay man oriented things and fujoshi oriented things are vastly different products.

As far as I’ve read of commentary from yuri manga authors, yuri manga is very much women writing the stories about women loving women that they wanted to read when they were girls. It just so happens that men who want to read about women loving women want to read the same kinds of women loving women that women do, and straight male otaku spend a shit-ton more money on otaku crap than lesbian female otaku.

I know that. But my point is that the industry caught on to that, and thus started producing yuri that is specifically aimed at men. And are these ones that become anime and get popular, while the ones focused on the female audiences remain largely niche.

It is a bit different from cases like Pretty Cure that, although have a large male following, is still aimed mostly at girl. A closer comparison on that genre would be Lyrical Nanoha.

Most “yuri” anime nowadays is actually just mostly super tame 4koma comedy things that are, at best, Class S type stuff like Inugami-san and Nekoyama-san or Sakura Trick. Actually full blown yuri anime, like the anime adaptation of Citrus or, god help you, NTR: Netsuzou Trap, are extremely rare. Netsuzou Trap getting an anime adaptation announced was… well, it wasn’t a very positive response from your typical otaku. Just don’t bring that series up around otaku; it’s probably a terrible idea. Citrus is probably safe, but I’m not sure, since I’m not into the “two girls suddenly become stepsisters and fall in love” sub-genre. Not my thing, so I wouldn’t know.

A lot of the most popular yuri manga, in both male and female audiences, have never gotten anime adaptations. Sasameki Koto is one exception that comes to mind, but basically none of the “serious” yuri that I would list as my favourites have gotten even OVAs. I would kill for a Wife and Wife OVA series, or more than a five minute teaser of Asagao to Kase-san, or anything adapted from Morinaga Milk or Morishima Akiko (YKA doesn’t count; she just does the art and the anime uses a different art style for some insane reason). I would kill more than Act trying to get to talk to Nasu for a Wife and Wife OVA. With Chiwa Saito and Shizuka Ito voicing the wife and wife.

An-anyway, it’s not nearly as male-dominated as you might think. Pretty much all of the series so far I’ve mentioned are from Comic Yuri Hime. Wife and Wife is from Comic Yuri Hime S (YuruYuri too), which was the male-targeted sister magazine of Comic Yuri Hime, that later was folded into Comic Yuri Hime. Sasameki Koto was in an anthology that’s otherwise unabashedly marketed towards men (mostly LN adaptations) but the series itself wasn’t particularly gendered in its focus. Miss Kobayashi’s Maidragon is written by a male (as far as I can tell) and marketed towards men (as far as I can tell) but has unbelievable popularity with women as well.

Hell, it might even be more popular among its lesbian audience than its straight male audience. I passed over the manga when it first came out because it just seemed like a bunch of big-titty pandering, but I gave it another look when the anime came out and people started raving, and holy shit it’s super good. Like, ultra good. Like “late twenties protagonist who has their life together adopts a kid with her girlfriend and has realistic struggles with being an adoptive mom” ultra good.

And it’s also really, really, really big titties pandering. That part is especially more popular with the lesbian audience. It’s like… Mononoke Sharing mixed with I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying. Both of which are by the same author. It’s like he’s actually two people: One who writes the most pandering big-titty manga imaginable and one who writes actual adult relationships between healthy couples that most otaku would kill to have.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, both the original LNs and manga adaptation of Maria-sama ga Miteru, which is pretty much the yuri series (despite being the series which pretty much single-handedly revived the Class S genre- which is related but a very different thing and do not let anyone tell you otherwise– in its modern form) were serialized in shoujo anthologies for teenage girls. Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon were both serialized in a magazine marketed at girls 8 to 14 that’s, like, the opposite of niche. Sabagebu! (which has yuri elements and got an anime awhile back) is also serialized in the same magazine that CCS and Sailor Moon were (wow, that’s surprising).

And all of these series are popular with both men and women alike. Like I said, most yuri manga popular with men are also popular with women, and vice-versa. Male and female yuri fans actually agree pretty nicely on the topic of yuri. If it’s marketed at men, it’s a pretty safe bet to say it’s just because Japan has way more straight men than lesbians.

Writers write because we don’t quite trust the power of images. Animators and directors express things visually because they don’t quite trust the power of words.

I dunno about this, entirely. I started writing because it’s easier to fake being good at writing until you develop actual skill at it than it is to fake being good at drawing until you’re actually decent at that. Just look at how many chapters it took Act to realize Fault In Our Stars was a pile of garbage compared to how long it took her to realize she didn’t like… well… pretty much any single piece of F/GO art posted in this thread.

Among the male characters, other than Akio I also like Saionji Kyouichi. I think everyone probably had some inkling of this, but the design for Matou Shinji from “Fate/stay night” originated with me thinking “Oh yeah, the male friend character’s definitely gotta have wavy hair!” (laughs)

Also, this part jumped out at me because I’ve described Shinji as “literally Saionji, except worse” and vice versa to people who only know one of the canons on multiple occasions. I never actually considered it was direct inspiration!

Which interview is this? I know he gave one recently to Terada of the Super Robot Wars/Original Generations series where it was an interview of him just as much. It turned out he’s a massive fan of the series and created Fate/Grand Order to be his version of Super Robot Wars.

My phone is kinda old, as I said, so I was pretty much dying to get in a hit before my phone crapped out and crashed the app, but I found a party that seems to mostly play nice with my amount of RAM and I’m blazing through it to get what I can out of it. I did get Saber Shiki with my first quartz draw, though, so that was nice. I’ve still got about 45 hours, as of this post, so I’m just gonna farm for as much loot as I can, and hopefully Assassin Shiki, and content myself with 1,000,000 QP and Saber Shiki as a consolation prize if/when I fail.

As for the story… I haven’t seen a lot of it, but Mephistopheles is fucking amazing. At first I was like… “wait, if he’s the villain, why is he the guest support? Oh, you, Mephistopheles!” but I took him anyway because 200FP, and then I was like “ah, that’s why he was the guest servant. Becasue MEPHISTOPHELES”. Strawberry Ice Cream/Shiki is always the KnK OTP, but Shiki/Mephistopheles hateship is good too.

So far, my favourite part of the event is how I was totally immune to thinking it was weird Shiki could kill zombies with her Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. Mephistopheles was like “wait, what?” and Shiki was like “what so I can kill zombies big whoop” and I was like “yeah duh she can see death lines of course she can kill zombies”.

Duh.

NASUVERSE!

Anyway, when the game isn’t crapping out on me… I actually find it kind of fun. The mobage aspects aren’t the best, of course, and I constantly feel like I’m making the worst choices with my resources (though the shitty quartz x10 roll I did earlier is still a bit bitter in my mouth) and have no clue which servants are worth using, and I hate the limited time events and GET IT NOW OR WAIT LIKE TWO FUCKING YEARS DIPSHIT thing but like…

The actual deckbuilding and card-selection strategy? Actually surprsingly fun for how simple it is.

And I am 10000% satisfied with how easily Mikon mehehes her way through absolutely everything. RIP AND TEAR.

Once this event is over, there’s going to be an AP 1/2 event up to the fourth singularity until the fifteenth so I’m probably gonna plow through as much of the story as I can while it’s cheap. And if I can’t get up to that point by the time the event its preparing for is over, I might just check out what I suspect was a Sword Art Online mobage while waiting for the next event (which features THOMAS EDISON, KING OF THE PRESIDENTS).

Congrats on the Saber Shiki. You got yourself a tanky wave-clearing servant.

If you want an idea of which servants are good or not, there are a lot of 3* servants that are pretty good. The gacha may be one of the worst on the market, but thankfully the devs balanced the game so that all the content is beatable with F2P servants. Some F2P servants are even better than their premium counterparts. For example, Euryale is a better anti-male archer than Orion, once her skill interlude comes out.

Man, I love the story of FGO. I love how each servant has a very distinct, poetic speaking pattern. And with such variety too. London was so much fun.

It’s so great, especially compared to the mobile Dissida game that just came out. I vastly prefer that game’s gacha system, but the story is… bland gruel. Admittedly it’s better than the immitation gruel from the original Dissidia games, but gruel nonetheless.

Yeah, it’s a shame that the events are temporary. They should make some of them permanent, like in Granblue Fantasy. It’ll make the game that much easier to get into for new players. Especially considering how difficult it is to get ascension materials outside events.

I’ve got a group of like four or five folks I can ask about game mechanics and stuff, so I’m pretty good on that. I’ve got a level 35 Tamamo Cat, currently looking for some more Rider Pieces to ascend her, and a just ascended Hans Christian Anderson and St. George. I think next I might work on Cu Culainn. Hans is the best Caster short of Medea, and St. George is an amazing tank, but it’s a pretty Arts heavy team for a wanna be Buster focused player such as myself. Cu’s got a QQABB card draw, good survivability (for some reason), a Single-Target Noble Phantasm, and lacks Tamamo Cat’s Stun period. I can swap between George and Cu depending on mission scenario, and use George to draw damage away from Tamamo and Hans to buff her, or buff with Hans and generate crits and focus on bosses with Cu while Tamamo clears mooks with her NP.

I tried and found the whole plot absurdly opaque, the art ugly, and the gameplay incredibly boring. It’s shitty even for a gacha game. Granted, I’m not motivated by seeing more Saber porn, so I may be missing the main draw.

Still, there are plenty of porny gatchas that are actually comprehensible and enjoyable.

It’s just not interesting. It doesn’t really require much thought, and worse, it decides to copy the card-game system that’s huge in gatchas for some reason even though it doesn’t have anything to do with the story or setting. I don’t understand why they went with cards instead of just regular turn-based or even better, tactical. The card system just sucks; I’ve never played one I liked.

Ah, see, that’s what I thought you’d say. While there is actually a lot more depth in selecting the right cards in the right order than you’d think at first glance, that’s not actually the primary gameplay of the game. It’s actually mostly a deckbuilding game where most of the strategy and thought plays out in fusing Craft Essences and Servants, picking the best team of Servants, assigning them the most complimentary Craft Essences, and getting it all under your points total.

Well, yes, obviously, most gatchas use that format. It… doesn’t really affect whether I enjoy the actual battles or not. Compare Brave Frontier, which was deckbuilding but had fun battles on top of it.

Weirdly, FGO is not the first time the Fate series has gone to cards. I’m pretty sure the cards in it are all straight from the various spinoffs that use them (The Card Captor Sakura spinoff, and the Ilya spinoffs, for example).
In the sense that the art they use to represent the classes is from them, I mean.

It’s weird, because if I remember correctly the summons appear as those stylized cards, but the battle cards are then just generic. It would have made a lot more sense to do like a YuGiOh thing where the servants lived in cards and you were calling upon them to attack. Still wouldn’t have been my cup of tea, but it wouldn’t have felt as out of left field as it did. Or maybe that was the intention and the lore was hidden somewhere I didn’t stumble into? I also found the UI to be a clusterfuck (though not as bad the the Digimon one, was could be used as a form of torture).

I mean, I play a lot of these myself, so yeah. That doesn’t change that each update for every game is followed by hundreds of comments going TITTIES over and over. I just recognize that I’m not the primary audience for these games, even if I do play them, so saberfen are certainly going to see a huge draw here nonsaberfen aren’t.

Well, yeah, that, and there’s a whole fuckton of lolis. Not arguing there isn’t a whole lot of sexual content here for the people who are into that, but there are other reasons to like it – even the gameplay, actually.

If you choose to interpret ‘I usually love these games but didn’t like this one, and they trade largely on titties so I’m also not the target audience’ as containing some covert insinution that people who like gatchas are scum (including myself I guess???) I can’t help you. Though I’d love to see the argument that gatcha games don’t pitch themselves with “COME SEE OUR BOOBS” considering the absurdity of mobile game ads is basically a meme.

Anyway, I’m not going to continue this conversation. This is stupid. I’m allowed to not like a certain kind of gameplay without having to reassure you you’re still allowed to like it.

Did y’all see that Emiya-san Chi no Kyou no Gohan got an anime adaptation? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first read that manga, and then I find out that it, and a shitload of other manga (like Wotaku ni Koi ga Muzukashii and After the Rain) that I never expected in a million years to get anime adaptaions were animated.

Can we talk about how Professor Layton and the Curious Village is just G-rated Paradox Spiral? Some aspects are so similar I kind of wonder if it was purposeful, but the two have such different audiences I have a hard time believing that.

– Both have a mysterious, trippy building that terrorizes residentes and forms the centerpiece of the story

– Both have the mystery complicated by memory loss and a seeming ‘reset’ of the people after terrible things happen

– The room in the basement where everyone is being monitored

– A mysterious man appearing around town who ends up being behind the robots/puppets

– A second mysterious man with a vendetta against the eldest detective

To be clear, I don’t really think it was on purpose (it’s more that the ‘they’re all dolls’ plot probably makes them hit the same beats) but it was just enough that as I was playing I was like, wait a second…

I haven’t played a Zelda game since Wind Waker, so I’m somewhat curious as to how he fits them all. That said, there don’t seem to be hard requirements. It’s all along the lines of “can you vaguely justify it within their canon”.

I definitely see no reason to even put Link in all the seven base classes when you can have Zelda herself as a much better Caster/Assassin and Ganondorf/Ganon as a Berserker. Or would he be Avenger, too?

Ahhh. Okay, I forget whether or not that’s possible, specifically. If summoning Servants is, like implied in F/SN, actually summoning the heroic spirit itself instead of creating a ‘copy’ of it, then that may be impossible regardless of whether the hero can qualify for multiple classes or not. If summoning Servants is still just creating copies to fit the class mold, then yeah, it’s possible (and it means UBW truly does nothing for Archer, as the copy will die with the knowledge but the base spirit won’t remember).

It theoretically shouldn’t be possible, but it happened once in the Third War thanks to a specific inborn ability of the Edelfelt family, which allows them to have two Magic Crest inheritors at the same time. The two sisters (one of whom may have been Rin and Sakura’s grandmother) summoned the same hero, a Saber, only each Saber reflected a different aspect of that hero’s legend.

I haven’t played a Zelda game since Wind Waker, so I’m somewhat curious as to how he fits them all.

Saber and Archer are a given; for Caster, he gets magic in several games, some of it quite powerful; for Rider, he has a mount in a few games (and a bird in Skyward Sword!); for Assassin, his whole shtick is taking down big toughies through trickery and cleverness; for Berserker, he’s a video game character, so his violence could easily be dialed up (maybe take the incarnation from one of the more fighty games, like Hyrule Warriors); and for Lancer, I’m told he can use a spear in Breath of the Wild.

It works because the cool thing about Link is that he is so versatile in a way few other heroes are. It would just be hilarious to take that to its logical extreme and have a war where he is every single Servant.

Yeah, I can easily see Archer/Saber/Rider in Link. As for Caster, Wind Waker and OOT Link can both literally affect the weather, time, and other shit mages would envy him for. Berserker feels the most like a stretch out of all of them, since it’s less a fighting style or even a propensity for violence as it is strictly madness.

In canon, I think Heracles is compatible with 6/7 of the main classes, only missing Caster. So he’s the closest I know of. It’d be hilarious if you had 6 aspects of Heracles in one war, and then the Caster was Hera.

I mean, both Nasuverse and Zelda operate on “whatever works for the story”, so you could do basically whatever! (I’d say ocarina/windwaker magic could work as Noble Phantasms for other classes, though — Noble Phantasms aren’t always directly related to the class’ function.)

My headcanon for Zelda has always been (and still is, “official” timeline or no) that instead of every game being a literal event in the timeline, they’re all just retellings and reinterpretations of the same story — so while it would be clearest to have each Link correspond to a specific entry in the series, you could easily slap whatever traits you want together and say that’s a valid incarnation of the hero.

In principle, there is a requirement for the Assassin in that your true name must not be widely known in association with your legend (so, mostly limiting the pool to various Hassassins and Jack the Ripper), but it kinda gets ignored in later installments.

With Berserker, your madness must be a big part of your legend, like Heracles and his Hera-induced fits of rage. A bigger problem with Berserker, however, is that summoning one is always deliberate as you have to add mad enchantment lines to the regular spell, and, from what I know, Link doesn’t have high enough baseline stats to justify it, he relies on skill rather than raw power.

You’d probably need something like Fate/Zero setup to justify it, where Zook was deliberately fucking with Kariya and made him summon a Berserker since maintaining one would take a fuckton of mana, causing Kariya great pain as penis worms were devouring him from the inside.

Otherwise, yeah, it comes down to the hero in question having a cool weapon of the right type, magic of some sort or a mount.

In principle, there is a requirement for the Assassin in that your true name must not be widely known in association with your legend (so, mostly limiting the pool to various Hassassins and Jack the Ripper), but it kinda gets ignored in later installments.

That works perfectly, then — there’s no way “Link” is his real name.

With Berserker, your madness must be a big part of your legend, like Heracles and his Hera-induced fits of rage.

Huh, that’s a harder one, then. There might be a game where he gets mind-controlled or possessed, but I don’t know it off the top of my head. Shadow Link, maybe?

A bigger problem with Berserker, however, is that summoning one is always deliberate as you have to add mad enchantment lines to the regular spell, and, from what I know, Link doesn’t have high enough baseline stats to justify it, he relies on skill rather than raw power.

I think that just gets into the question of why anyone ever summons Berserker, since it seems like a universally terrible idea. Does the added enchantment mean you have to do a targeted summon, or could you still have a random summon like Shriou with Arturia?

You can have a random Berserker summon. Maybe a Servant only qualifies for the Berserker class, or maybe all the other slots have already been filled and you can only summon their Berserker aspect.

If you’re not a strong mage, or your Servant is weak, Mad Enhancement can boost their attributes to a more useful level. Some Servants are also less uncontrollable than others; Herakles, for instance, is surprisingly loyal to Ilya.

If the Servant is weak enough, it’s theoretically possible for them to not consume that much energy even with their Mad Enhancement. That said, you’re right in that summoning a Berserker is always a risky proposition; it’s why basically every Berserker Master died because of their Servants before Ilya.

What I mean is that he wasn’t trying to summon Arthuria on purpose. You can use plot contrivance to get a summon if necessary — all the Masters are Zelda nerds with paraphernalia present or something silly like that.

Oh, what if the new Zelda game is just released and there’s been a media blitz with lots of promo materials everywhere? Some of them summon Link because they’re fans, some of them are all ??? who’s this jackass because the wall outside the apartment’s plastered in posters and they got a promotional coin with their lunchbread and stuck it in their pocket.

You can still summon a Berserker without using the added lines, and the added lines can’t summon a hero as a Berserker if they don’t meet the requirements in the first place. Also, it’s not exactly that Assassins can’t be widely-known, and in the Fuyuki system only Hassans are usually available, unless you mess with the system somehow (like Medea did).

Later installments have varying levels of justification as to why people other than the Hassans can be summoned.